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"This talk will consider the notion of sonic possible worlds in relation to the body. I will discuss the body as material and fleshly body, as human and more than human form, whose sonic possibilities ruptures norms and expectations through invisible permutations, silences and screams. Thus, I will sound and articulate a body in trans-formation, ephemeral and porous; questioning of individuation and the boundary of the skin. And hope to hear the unrecognizable body, at the margins of the representational frame and at the brink of viability, to engage in how its sonic possibility challenges who we count as real, and how we hear their actuality: the norms and naturalizations that give us the recognizable body and its name."

The Expressive Body: Memory, Devotion, Desire (1400-1750), an exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum Contemplates sacred and secular bodies in painting and sculpture, and how our bodies as viewers interact with them, the show is a perfectly timed refresher on the importance of physicality in art.

Oorwonde is an interactive aural installation in which the visitor becomes a willing 'patient' to hear, feel, influence and manipulate the soundtrack of a fictitious operation. Speakers, electro-magnets, vibrator motors and piezoelectric disks entwine with the human body, creating a unique composition and performance. Based on Bernhard Leitner's philosophy that "listening is understood to extend to all parts of the body and sound to touch a deep nerve", Oorwonde explores the concept of bodily hearing as multiple elements target different body parts. Hearing is no longer restricted to the ears.

"Van Dam and de Boer have developed the following idea from these different interests. In several recordings of Dam filmed (and sound is recorded) when he performs Sequenza VIII . Emphasizing first half total, the body and the intimacy with the instrument. Then abstract details filmed, like his hands, his ear, details of the violin, strings and the like. In the editing is from the portrait / body of the violinist a more fragmented, abstract image created a physical, gives spatial experience in the tension between the music and the image rhythm. If the body and the violin in abstract details and solve dancing away in the (sound) space."

"Bodyscape is inspired by the body of a dancer as sonic source. The information is taken via biosensors and microphones, which record movements and events generated by the body. In this ecosystem, the dancer produces sounds, mainly inaudible, which are then amplified and send back to the performance space, where the dancer interact with them as biofeedback. The site-specificity of the work relates to the spatial considerations and resonances. Field recordings were collected at the border of Botswana and South Africa. L'épidemie virale en Afrique du Sud, a text from the Swiss writer Friedrich Dürrenmatt, informed the journey. The text describes a virus transforming white persons into black persons. A text about privileges."

Vibrations conducted through a person's bones produce the uncanny sensation of low sounds emanating from within the body. The New York-based artist Sergei Tcherepnin draws on this effect in Stereo Classroom Chairs (2015), mounting a transducer to the underside of each wooden seat on which visitors are invited to sit. When not attached, a transducer plays sounds quietly, at a level that is almost inaudible. When its surface touches another object, however, the material characteristics of that object filter the sounds in various ways. Here, Tcherepnin's audio composition travels through the body of each sitter with a physical intensity. The chair amplifies the composition, while the sitter acts as the filter, amplifying low-frequency sounds and muffling higher frequencies.

"The exercises presented in this book have been developed by the author as part of his listening workshops and artistic research on acoustics and the body. Exploring issues concerning: contact, filter, and distance, each of the exercises evokes a situation where the body is used wholly as a medium for experiencing sounds in relation to one's present self. The exercises guide listeners to encounter sounds distributed in space in relation to their sources considering shifts in frequency, amplitude, and rhythm."

S.T.R.H. Smoleński's installation fills the main exhibition hall of the Łaźnia Centre for Contemporary Art in Gdańsk entirely, denying viewers a safe distance and pulling them towards its interior. The visual elements consist of massive, static, 3-dimensional objects which generate low-frequency sound at specific intervals. The sound unfolds from a nearly inaudible acoustic pressure into powerful rumblings that shake everything in their path - including the walls of the space and the body of the viewer - and eventually dissipate into complete silence. This way, contact with the work of art becomes a total sensory experience that involves not only the viewer's vision and hearing but their whole body; it is an entirely physical sensation. Though not devoid of a visual presence, the piece makes its impact mainly with sound, which, generated in specific ways, creates the impression of an all-encompassing experience - a synthesis of the senses that combines cues perceived by spatial receptors (eyes and ears) and contact receptors (skin and muscle).

"Trained as a musical composer, Beer (who created a 'Vessel Orchestra' for his 2019 solo show at the Met Breuer) works with the acoustic fingerprints of architecture, asking vocalists to stimulate their natural harmonics. 'Since I was a kid, I could hear the notes of buildings,' he says, explaining that a room is like a seashell, constantly making its own sounds.  When he found himself on the wrong side of the Sydney Opera House, he led his four local singers to an external nook of the building, then asked them to lock lips and treat each other's bodies as architecture. 'The acoustic space that they're working with is the empty mouth of the other person that they're singing through.'"

"Public artworks don't often include life-sized balloons- but that hasn't stopped UK artists Alison Ballard and Mike Blow from creating them. POD is an interactive sound installation that allows viewers to experience the physical life of sound waves through the skins of two, six-foot-tall inflatable spheres. The surfaces of POD pulsate in rhythm with a sound file that plays from deep within the sphere. Audience members are invited to drape their faces and bodies over these surface, free to enjoy POD's gentle massage. "

"My research is also experimenting with new immersive technology in the areas of vibrotactile experiences, gesture recognition devices and sensor technology that translates body movement into digitally generated sound and image. Each of these technologies has initially been developed to enhance the sensory experiences of those with sensory loss, mental illness or individuals with disabilities."

"Quick-what does a brain sound like? Time's up! The answer is, of course, "nothing." If you said "lightning and sparks," though, you're forgiven. Odds are good that every "trip" you've taken inside the brain has featured a CGI image of squiggly gray matter, accompanied by the sizzling sound of electricity. This and other sonic clichés-blood whooshing through veins, organs squishing and pulsing-are as much a part of a certain type of hour-long TV drama as a plot twist before a commercial break. They're also a staple in documentaries, where such sounds accompany visuals depicting smaller dramas, like the journey of a blood cell, or the ravages of puberty."

"Mariska de Groot is a Dutch interdisciplinary artist who has been making and performing comprehensive analog light-to-sound instruments and installations for the last few years. Just like Dewi de Vree, who we've featured before on this blog, she is a part of iii, an artist-run platform supporting radical interdisciplinary practices engaging with image, sound and the body in the Hague."

"Each structure uniquely incorporates the circulation of water from the James River, which flows across the entire state of Virginia, reminding us to consider our bodies as mediums for environmental pollutants. "

"Each structure uniquely incorporates the circulation of water from the James River, which flows across the entire state of Virginia, reminding us to consider our bodies as mediums for environmental pollutants. "

Article featuring Kevin Beasley, Nikita Gale and Christine Sun Kim. "SOUND DOES NOT EXIST IN A VACUUM-it requires a medium through which to propagate. Innovations in electroacoustics have worked to partition and privatize the sonic realm, separating voices and music from their host bodies and feeding them cleanly to the ear via high-fidelity speakers, noise-canceling headphones, and other means. But sound represents only one facet of a listening experience."

A personal essay about hearing loss, disability, the amplification of the sound of one's body, the way that hearing and mishearing leads to metaphor, and the losses and gains of disability as well as normative sensing.

"For Alexiou, the immersive listening debate is easily put to rest. "Humans can hear down to roughly 20Hz. If you look at the frequency response of many headphones and some speakers, they often rate their range somewhere close to that. The reality, however, is, you can rarely have the power and privacy to be able to drive them appropriately. In the case of headphones, sound is only hitting your ears, not your body, something any sound system enthusiast knows the limitations of all too well. It's the feeling that matters.""

"Touch reorients us to the fundamental condition of being - to the inevitability of others, human and nonhuman. In touching, we are most vulnerable because we are always also being touched back. The analogy that Merleau-Ponty uses in his posthumously published work, The Visible and the Invisible (1964), is this: when my one hand touches the other, which one is doing the touching, and which one is being touched? We have eyelids; we can pinch our noses and shut our ears; but there are no natural skin-covers. We cannot turn off our sense of touch. To be a human in the world is to be tactile, to always be touching and touched with every single pore of our bodies. Advertisement "